O.R./Analytics at Work Blog

My mother worked for EPA for almost 20 years, instilling me with a respect for the world around me. The topic of O.R. and the Environment seemed like a natural (weak pun intended) fit. I was struck by the sentence in Patricia Randall’s blog entry, “While I am certain it is possible to include green objectives in a model, I haven’t had a client say ‘Minimize my emissions or my carbon footprint’. Or have I?” “Green objectives” need a paradigm shift from being viewed as going above and beyond, to being intrinsic to the fabric of good business. What O.R. and analytics are already doing is finding the best way to solve problems with optimum impact, and that optimization should include preserving the planet we all share.

There are many opportunities for OR/MS and analytics folks to include “greening” as an element of their analysis that protects the earth while streamlining supply chain networks and decision models, decreasing waste, and increasing revenue and production. Maybe the call is to go beyond the obvious solution, to add in environmentally friendly options, as a “value-added” service to your clients, or to calculate the impact to future generations of not implementing green measures. Of course, this could be viewed as Pollyanna thinking, that it isn’t financially possible, it’s too difficult, or that no one really cares about those types of objectives. But to quote a cute, mustachey guy (no, not Paul Rubin,) “I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees.”

Thank you to everyone who submitted to this blog challenge, they will be included in the upcoming Focus On Environment, a compilation of articles from INFORMS journals. As we head into the holidays, the next blog (and perhaps personal) challenge will be O.R. and Families. Please email your entries to socialnetworking@mail.informs.org by December 12.

O.R. and the Environment

Extra Credit goes to Anna Nagurney and Laura McLay for two entries.

• Brilliant Lecture by Dr. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Laureate and Activist, Anna Nagurney
• Sustainability of Supply Chain Networks, Anna Nagurney
• only you (and your optimization model) can prevent forest fires, Laura McLay
• crowd sizes, home energy usage, baseball odds, and pop songs, Laura McLay
• Environmental Business – A Green Light for Analytics?, Capgenini Blog Team
• Corporate Buyouts, Sustainability in the DNA? , Ian Frommer
• EnviORment [sic], Francisco Marco-Serrano
• Deciding on Lean or Green, John Poppelaars
• OR, the Environment, and the Law of Unintended Consequences, Paul Rubin
• Optimizing Your Transportation Network can Reduce Your Carbon Footprint , Patricia Randall
• Primal and dual valuation of our natural resources using O.R., Thiago Serra
• Water supply and the environment, David Smith
• Jumbo decision models to protect the environment, Shivaram Subramanian
• Grizzlies, Pandas, and Optimal Ecological Structures, Mike Trick

There has been a lot of buzz about the analytics movement here at INFORMS beginning with the Capgemeini study that was completed last fall. The INFORMS Board of Directors have approved funding to build out the executive forum at the rebranded Analytics Conference, as well as developing certification and continuing education programs. The INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research set unbelievable attendance records. There is now an Analytics Section of INFORMS, and the readership of Analytics Magazine is growing by leaps and bounds. Would you like to offer your two cents? Participate in our online survey about developing a certification program for individuals in the analytics field. We may be onto something here.

Part of the OR/MS challenge (at least from a marketing point of view) has been how to explain/convey/sell operations research to the uninitiated masses. This blog has been one way to learn about different viewpoints, our twitter peeps are getting quite chatty, and there are some great discussions on LinkedIn. But these conversations tend to reach an already involved audience. We’d love to spread the word about OR/MS and analytics to a wider audience. So June’s Blog Challenge (in honor of the upcoming Harry Potter final installment) will be O.R. for Muggles. Please send your entries to graphics@mail.informs.org.

Our bloggers extraordinaire offer their take on the subject of May's Blog Challenge, O.R. and Analytics

• Analyse This! : Analytics explained and applied
  Capgemini Figure it out blog
• Welcome to the Insight Age Larry D’Agostino
• Green O.R. Job Skills: Business Analytics vs. Sustainability Ian Frommer
• On "Analytics" and related fields Harlan Harris
• Terrorism Analytics Laura McLay
• Analytics and Operations Research -- Learning from One Another Anna Nagurney
• Analytics and Operations Research; a practitioner’s view John Poppelaars
• When the Data Changes Before the Model Even Finishes Solving Patricia Randall
• Will Analytics Drag O.R. Back to Its Roots? Paul Rubin
• How Analytics makes Operations Research the next big thing Thiago Serra
• April 1963 discussion: OR v Analytics Shivaram Subramanian
• Business Analytics and Operations Research: Tomato, To-mah-toe, Tractor! Mike Trick
• Should You Hire Security When Tenting Your House? Tallys Yunes

A very provocative study, The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work, conducted at my institution, UMass Amherst, by Joya Misra, Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, Elissa Dahlberg Holmes and Stephanie Agiomavritis, is being released today in Academe. The study, based on a survey of 350 faculty, confirmed growing scholarship that, when it comes to promotions to full professorship, women may hit a glass ceiling near the top of the ivory tower.

Men still hold more than three-quarters of full professorships in the United States, and women’s share of full professorships has increased only marginally over the last several decades. Women are less likely ever to be promoted to full professor than men, and their promotions take longer. A 2006 report of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey, showed that women professors in the association were less likely to be promoted than their male counterparts, and it took women from one to three and a half years longer than men to advance to full professorships, with women at doctoral universities lagging farthest behind.

The situation is no better in STEM fields: A study of tenured and tenure-track women faculty members in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields by Georgia Institute of Technology sociologist Mary Frank Fox and cultural studies and literature professor Carol Colatrella identified ambiguity in institutions’ criteria for promotion to full professor. While most faculty members interviewed could identify the expectations for tenure, fewer could identify the expectations for promotion to full professor. This lack of clarity opens the door for promotion based on vague criteria rather than straightforward expectations.

INSIDE Higher Ed has a terrific summary of this study, called, The Gender Gap on Service, and notes that for years, women have complained that they are assigned a disproportionate share of departmental service duties. Some suggested strategies for changing this climate from this study:

• Colleges work to replace lost faculty lines. By relying increasingly on adjuncts -- many of whom do not serve on committees, have formal advising duties, and so forth -- colleges have forced more service duties on associate professors. (Many departments try to protect junior faculty members on the tenure track, so they can meet research expectations for tenure.)
• "Cultural changes also matter," the report argues, regardless of how many faculty members are in a department. "Deans and department chairs or heads need to examine teaching, advising, mentoring, and service responsibilities to ensure that all faculty members pull their weight and are rewarded accordingly," the study says.
• And I would add the following: there need to be mechanisms in place to reward exceptional service at all levels. As a Chaired Full Professor, who cares for the institution, I have co-written proposals to acquire faculty lines, which were successful, and as a consequence, 3-4 new faculty were hired in the past 3 years for our group. Without this additional effort on my part for which I received no added compensation or even recognition (besides some muted applause) our "group" would have been left with the department chair supervising two Full Professors (and we run programs at the undergrad, MBA, and doctoral levels).

Women need to start taking care of themselves and their careers and administrators need to advocate for the recognition of women for their contributions in all dimensions of research, teaching, and service and to back them with promotions and financial compensation.

The exploitation of successful women under the gauze of "service" needs to be put to a stop.

Dr. Anna Nagurney is the John F. Smith Memorial Professor in the Department of Finance and Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Read more of her writing at http://annanagurney.blogspot.com/

As my operations-research readers know, analytics has become the word en vogue in the community - the INFORMS Practice conference was recently renamed INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research to reflect this trend, as Mike Trick pointed out in this blog post of his. My non-operations-research readers will be left thinking: what exactly is operations research anyway? Research on operations? That is partly true - OR (as we call it, which makes for some interesting Google queries since the web service mistakes it for "or" (as in "either/or") emerged from the need to improve military logistics during World War II, but has become much broader than that, now representing the broad field of quantitative decision-making.

According to this Wikipedia page, "operations research is an interdisciplinary mathematical science that focuses on the effective use of technology by organizations"; this certainly is the most awful definition of OR that I've ever seen. The second paragraph is more accurate, stating: "Employing techniques from other mathematical sciences --- such as mathematical modeling, statistical analysis, and mathematical optimization --- operations research arrives at optimal or near-optimal solutions to complex decision-making problems."

Few non-OR trained people will naturally come to the same conclusion when first faced with operations research, and the issue of how to call what we are doing is one that we have all struggled with, whenever anyone asks us about our profession. (I stick to: "I do mathematical models for business.") In contrast, analytics has become a much more accepted term in the business community, where books by Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris have emerged as market leaders: "Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning" (2007) is a landmark book in that respect, and was followed earlier this year by "Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results". These books are published by Harvard Business Press, which certainly added to their legitimacy.

Mike Trick recently posted on his Twitter feed a graph, using a new Google Labs tool called n-grams, showing the incidence of words like "operations research" and "analytics" in books; when this morning a friend and reader of this blog sent me a more complete graph including "industrial engineering" and "systems engineering", I figured it was time for a blog post. Here is the graph, courtesy of Andrew Ross. You will notice that the use of "operations research" abruptly rose in the 1950s and peaked in the early 1960s, to undergo a fast-paced decline ever after. This is not good news for our profession, as "operations research" is part of the brand we communicate to the media and potential business collaborators. Analytics, on the other hand, is currently the most popular of the terms by far, and the trend does not seem to be slowing down by far...

Read the rest of this post on Aurelie Thiele's blog Thoughts on business, engineering and higher education